Utility to re-assign cores to a different order

[spine]

Hey guys,

I've done some googling but found nothing. I'm just wondering; is there any utility out there that'll let you re-assign a cpu's cores to a different order?



I've always found with any multi-core cpu I've owned that the cores will be ordered with hottest first and coolest last. Right now I'm interested in pushing my overclocking beyond 'true' stability for the sake of better performance in games that never fully load a cpu.

It'd be nice to reverse-order my cores so that the most used cores are the coolest ones.

I'd guess that the core id's would be hardcoded within the cpu, but I can't see any reason why the OS has to obey that order at all. Surely at the very least some kind of driver layer could re-order the cores?


So yeah, does anyone know of such a utility?

I wonder if Windows could simply be told a new order via the registry or something...

 

[Blue Fox]

You can set processor affinity for programs through the task manager and set certain programs to utilize only certain cores/cpus. As for the temperature differences, the first one is the hottest because it winds up being used the most, so if you put everything on a different core instead, you'll get similar results.

 

[spine]

I know about processor affinity, what I'm after is a way to remap the order of the cores.

Core2 Quads aren't 'true' quad core chips and are made of of 2 dualcore dies. Invariably one die will be better than the other. It seems, from my experience with these chips, that intel always makes sure the hottest die is core #0 and #1 and the cooler die is #2 and #3.

If I fully load my cpu, cores #0 and #1 will be at 69°c whilst the other two will be around 63°c.

It'd be nice to have the better of the dies be the first 2 cores as windows understands it as they're the better die.

 

[Falkentyne]

You can't.
All you can do is either disable cores in the bios or use NUMPROC=(1-6 depending on how many cores you have) in the boot.ini
Also, sometimes it's the cache that fails. And it's not always the hotter core that fails first. I've seen core 4 fail on a core 2 many times. And then you have to deal with the inaccurate sensor problem...

 

[nitrobass24]

It'd be nice to have the better of the dies be the first 2 cores as windows understands it as they're the better die.

Whats the point? Windows is going to spread the workload across all 4 anyways

 

[Falkentyne]

Not only that, remapping cores wont do anything if it were possible.. As the poster said above, even in single threaded games, the workload is usually spread out anyway. So just use the processor affinity tool if you're worried about crashing. You can also use imagecfg tool to set affinity for an application at startup (make a backup of the executable first), if you really want single threaded programs to use one of the cooler cores.

That's all you can do. For multithread or general windows usage of the cores, it spreads the workload.